September 12, 2013

NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
• Secret deal places no legal limits on use of data by Israelis
• Only official US government communications protected
• Agency insists it complies with rules governing privacy

One of the smart things Glenn Greenwald did in managing the drip-drip-drip of Edward Snowden revelations was to push revelations about Israel way back in his queue. I pointed out 3 months ago that reporters like Carl Cameron and James Bamford had long ago revealed some of how Israel spies on Americans, but that's not what Americans, especially the American press, are interested in hearing. For example, Cameron's multipart 2001 series on Israeli spying on Americans was deleted from Fox's website almost immediately.

59 comments:

NOTA
said...

Now, Steve, don't be a conspiracy theorist. What possible bad thing could come of giving a foreign country complete access to every American's personal communications, including whom they talk with and when and what they say? What possible downside could there be to this?

This is good news, so many of our policies favor our enemies that it's nice to see for once that we also have rational policies that favor our friends and are in our interests. We need to see more of this kind of thing and less of the kind of thing that goes on with Pakistan and China.

It struck me how benign Israeli espionage is in the US - "to learn our positions on the Middle East", according to the article, presumably to better craft their own policy - as contrasted with the industrial and malicious espionage of countries like China and even France. It saddens me that we see this as a concern and that we ourselves aggressively target Israel for cyber-attacks and our own espionage, to the point where we see them as the third (!) most important target for us. All those resources could be much better employed against China or Pakistan.

Oh well, once can't expect a totally rational policy from the US. But it's nice to hear of a silver lining in our often insane foreign policy every now and then.

Anytime the goyim are talking among themselves, grave danger is afoot. We must know every word that every one of them is saying, and every thing that every one of them is doing, without restriction or limit. They have no human rights. This is evidently an operative assumption.

Ha! Weeks ago I reminded colleagues that the NSA has long evaded domestic spying restrictions by simply trading intercepts and analyses with foreign spy agencies, allowing politicians on both sides to deny spying on their citizens. They just don't explain that they've outsourced such work.

What does he say about the boat people and the Liberal Party's voters?

- "John Howard [the former Liberal prime minister] claimed he stopped the boats. It's true he introduced harsh policies and the boats stopped, but the harsh policies had nothing to do with the boats stopping."

In other words, enforcement did work and can work. Under Howard's policy, boat arrivals dropped from 5,516 in 2001 to 1 (yes, O-N-E) in 2002, and there were less than 300 until 2007, when the number jumped back up to 13,000.

- "I fear in Australia a return to the sectarianism that divided society between Protestant and Catholic...I fear the debates over the last 10 years have created a Christian-Muslim divide in Australia."

It's not the incompatibility of Islam with the West that has caused tension in Australia, it's talking about it.

- On PM John Howard's decision to stop the boats: " It was a conscious decision to appeal to narrow-minded Australians to win votes. Without it, Howard would have lost that election [in 2001]. I remember speaking with very senior people within the Labor Party at the time and I said: "There are lot of Liberals who hate these policies, who hate what's happening and a lot of people in your own party who hate these policies - why don’t you appeal to the middle ground? The person I was speaking to just looked at me and said: "Malcom, you just don't understand how this ripped so many rednecks out of the Labor Party - I'm not going to let them rip any more. It was competition for the rednecks and a major error of judgement by the Labor Party."

Because voters who oppose mass immivasion are rednecks, and politicians in democratic countries should pay them no mind.

Fraser also implies that it's US foreign policy driving the Muslim refugee problem, but Muslims were already Australia's main asylum seekers well before 9/11.

Yes, smart timing. But you are giving credit to the wrong party. We can only speculate when the Snowdon affair became a Russian intelligence operation but it is evident it did. The damage to American SIGINT programs have been nothing short of disastrous,

Russia has been able to deliver even more pain by exposing the extent of these programs globally and, in particular, of Americans.

That is the context in which Obama and the national security establishment has desperately sought a means to deliver payback. A war on Russia's ally Syria was the chosen means, with this (latest) chemical attack the pretext.

Thus, I think that the above more accurately explains the timing of these revelations on Israel/NSA. With this, Putin is delivering additional pain to the US, and sending a clear message to the Israelis that they should join the UK in running into the woods on Syria.

America's national interests suffered grievous damage when Snowdon gave the Russians these secrets. The severe degrading of the reputation of the US government and Obama derives from its surveillance state overreach.

I'm so shocked to find out that the NSA has an open ended pipe to Israel. I mean, any idiot who reads some of our favorite websites already knows that. What's shocking to me is that Jonathan Pollard has not yet been pardoned.

Really, this is why I'm in no mood to string up Snowden and BradleyChelsea Manning. All we find out from their leaks is stuff we already know or have suspicioned. The group of people that came out of Wikileaks with the biggest eggs on their faces are crackpot utopian leftists, when they found out with leaked diplomatic cables that Democrat/left foreign relations bureaucrats aren't crackpot utopian lefists.

"Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.

In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency's Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel."

I believe Carl Cameron ran a story about an Israeli spy ring running out of kiosks in America's malls a week after 911.....over one hundred Israeli's were arrested.....unfortunately,a few days after the story ran....it was gone from the net.....I seriously question the dual citizenship of some of our legislature.....who are they really loyal to?

Mr. Sailer, maybe you should try reading the underlying document instead of trusting a liar like Greenwald. If you did that, you would see that the document reflects an agreement not to share Americans' data and there is no evidence of "Israel's spying on Americans." Anyone can read the agrrement for themselves here.

The document states up front that :This agreement between NSA and The Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) prescribesprocedures and responsibilities for ensuring that ISNU handling of materials provided by NSA . . . is consistent with the requirements placed upon NSA by U.S. law and Executive Order to establish safeguards protecting the rights of U.S. persons under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. (Section I.a)

The document goes on to state:NSA and ISNU have previously discussed the protection of U.S. Person information, in relation to tasking joint collection operations. and agreed in principle to not task communications of U.S. citizens. The proposal to share unminimized raw collection requires additional procedures to meet formal requirements. (Section III. b)

There’s not a word in the agreement about how the NSA will provide Americans’ data to Israel. The whole purpose of the document is to lay out how to protect the privacy of communications of "U.S. Persons". The remainder of the document describes the procedures for doing this. If, as you and Greenwald claim, the NSA shares Americans' data with Israel, much less "Israel[] sp[ies] on Americans,” the entire document would be nonsensical.

First of all, the document requires the NSA to "Regularly review a sample of files transferred to ISNU to validate the absence of U.S. Persons identities." (Section IV. a. 2) Why would they do that if the idea was to send Israel Americans' data?

The agreement also prohibits Israel from "us[ing] any information provided by NSA, as raw material or otherwise, to intentionally intercept the communications to, from or about a U.S. person." (Section IV. b. 2) So much for "spying on Americans."

Finally, the document specifies procedures that have no purpose other than to protect Americans' communications in the event that some of them are included in the raw SIGINT.

Section V. a:ISNU must inform NSA imediately upon detection, via the SUSLAIS. when the identity of a US. person is found in the raw SIGINT provided to ISNU.

Section V. b:ISNU must inform NSA immediately upon via the SUSLAIS. of inadvertent intercept of U.S. person communications where a selector that is believed to belong to a valid foreign target issubsequently found to belong to a U.S. person. ISNU further agrees to detask any and all such selectors. and to destroy any intercept collected as a result of such selectors. whether processed or not.

If the goal was to share Americans' data, why have those requirements? Furthermore, this shows that Greenwald's claim that "only official US government communications protected" is a flat-out lie.

Finally, Greenwald conveniently neglects to mention that this agreement was never entered into. The document is "effective immediately upon execution" (Section VII. a) but as you can see from the signature page, was never signed at all on behalf of the US. There might be a signature on behalf of Israel, although Greenwald chose to black it out and oddly there's no date. There might be a fully executed version, and there might be an executed version that's different in one or more ways, but we have no way of knowing. Well, Greenwald might know, since he has thousands of other documents, but he's not sharing.

MLK - and sending a clear message to the Israelis that they should join the UK in running into the woods on Syria.

Comedy gold! Because of course its the US that really wants to attack Syria, the Israelis are merely along for the ride.

Its nice to see all those principled jewish movers & shakers in the US putting their shoulders to the wheel of US foreign policy in lobbying for an attack on Syria. One usually thinks of AIPAC operating in support of Israel but now they prove their loyalty as true American patriots.

You'll notice the lack of big demos against NSA spying since the initial non-revelations came out.

They should have waited for the next Republican President and then revealed it. It would have led to an impeachment, at a minimum. And the left could have had years of fun doing what they do best - spluttering in outrage over things they don't actually give a damn about.

The NSA had laws requiring them not to spy on Americans, and yet did it anyway, The Mossad (or whatever you call Israels sigint agency) may have a secret agreement not to spy on Americans. I'm somehow skeptical that this has much effect.

One wonders what the Mossad offered the NSA to get access to that data, and what cleaning up of the data was done before it was sent over. If we lived in a functional country, there would be a serious independent investigation of this to find out. But we'll probably get interested in some useless starlet's sex scandal instead and forget the whole thing.

it's nice to see for once that we also have rational policies that favor our friends

A hope dearest to my heart is that many, many thousands of young Americans are sent to their deaths and trillions more are taken from our treasury to further the aims of our dear, dear Israeli friends.

First, no, I am not Whiskey. If I were,I would be 'Whisky' without the 'e', since that is how the Scots spell it and they invented the stuff.

Second, the other commenter referring to mine as "comedy gold" should apply Occam's Razor to the question of Israel's interest in Syria. The Assad regime they know is preferable to an Islamist unknown.

It has been evident for anyone with eyes to see that both the US and Israel have not been interested in the removal of the Assad regime. They have done little to effect that outcome, unless you consider harsh words consequential. Indeed, Israel has bombed Syria (to keep Hezbollah from getting weapons from Iran). How does the Israeli tail always wags the US dog explain that? Weren't they supposed to get the US to do so through a quick AIPAC diktat?

The salient question -- the dog that isn't barking, is why after two years in Obama in war mode. I offered what I think is an explanation that holds up, especially as it has taken on such a US vs. Russia character.

Israel's preference is neither for Assad not for the Sunnis. It's for Arabs fighting each other. That way they have less time and resources to fight Israel. As long as Assad holds power, Israel and the neocons will support his enemies. If Assad falls, Israel will start supporting the people who'll have a grudge against the new government of Syria, whoever that will be.

The Assad regime backs Shia Iran and Hezbollah. Iran is the ultimate target. So any attack on Iran could bring unconventional retaliation from Hezbollah using Assad's Syria for material support and a safe haven. Therefore, toppling Assad, even if it means a radical Sunni presence, is preferable because it eliminates a potential threat if and when Iran is attacked.

Plus taking out Assad might just bring the Iranians into the fight. This would accelerate an attack on Iran, which the hawks have not been able to get despite five years of war mongering.

It struck me how benign Israeli espionage is in the US - "to learn our positions on the Middle East", according to the article, presumably to better craft their own policy - as contrasted with the industrial and malicious espionage of countries like China and even France

Israel traded Jonathan Pollard's voluminous stolen secrets to the USSR. After the Persian Gulf War, Israel sold our Patriot missile tech to China; Israel later sold other military tech (whether stolen or obtained through defense cooperation) to China, in open defiance of our wishes.

A larger point is that once secrets are stolen, there is no telling who will get his hands on them. If Israelis steal our secrets, some other country (Russia, China, a Muslim state, etc.) can turn around and steal the secrets from Israel.

Please remember the NSA has access to every phone conversation, text, and email everyone makes in the USA. If you think only traffic analysis is involved, not content collection, then you're dumb.

But hey, why object to having, in effect, an Israeli spy sitting in every room in your house? How does it hurt you? Unless you are doing something wrong, you shouldn't worry, right? In any case, it's none of your concern. Pass the knish.

Anytime the goyim are talking among themselves, grave danger is afoot. We must know every word that every one of them is saying, and every thing that every one of them is doing, without restriction or limit.

Cass Sunstein ---- a Jewish-American who held a senior regulatory position in the Obama administration, who has advocated coercive measures against and “cognitive infiltration” of “conspiracy theories,” and who is the husband of prominent US diplomat Samantha Powers – has made a similar argument.

In an article entitled “Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?,” he argues that civil society organizations such as “sports clubs, religious groups and parent-teacher associations” allowed Nazi and antisemitic ideology to quickly spread throughout Germany without attracting official scrutiny. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/could-bowling-leagues-and-the-pta-breed-nazis-.html

Sunstein goes on to warn that these activities and “dense social networks also increase people’s vulnerability to extremism. A great deal of work suggests that terrorism itself can arise not because people are isolated, poor or badly educated, but because they are part of tightly knit networks in which hateful ideas travel quickly.” Because any social network or civil society organization is a potential source of “extremism,” or “terrorism,” all such groups are potentially suspect.

Purportedly “liberal” publications such as Slate soon began touting this argument. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2013/06/the_rise_of_nazi_germany_did_the_prevalence_of_hunting_and_singing_clubs.single.html

It is only a matter of time until the American ruling class begins to argue that any insufficiently-diverse gathering of three or more Whites (or White males) needs an official “minder” to prevent “hate” and “non-inclusion.”

The Jerusalem Post ran an article worrying that the NSA's spying on American citizens at the direction and for the benefit of Israel endangers the privacy rights of American Jews living in Israel. The author goes on to predict that the privacy rights of Jewish-Americans living in Israel will be scrupulously protected during surveillance operations that pass other Americans' data to Israel. Jewish-Americans living abroad, in other words, will not be monitored and have their information shared to the same extent as that of goyim-Americans living abroad. The idea that the goyim might not want their personal lives perused by Israelis never seems to occur to the author.

Anon 11:21, I went to Bloomberg to read the Sustein article, and I noticed the authors of the other Bloomberg stories being flogged there: Matloff, Kopel, Abramowitz, Levine, Pesek, and Weil. Even the only one listed that could be construed as goyim, Megan McArdle, is married to a guy named Suderman!

America's national interests suffered grievous damage when Snowdon gave the Russians these secrets."

No, it is in the "national interest", i.e. the interest of actual US citizens living in America, to NOT be spied upon by their own government. What the government and its various organs means by the term "national interest" is "in the interest of a permanent hostile elite". Snowden did me a great service.

Cass Sunstein ---- a Jewish-American who held a senior regulatory position in the Obama administration, who has advocated coercive measures against and “cognitive infiltration” of “conspiracy theories,” and who is the husband of prominent US diplomat Samantha Powers – has made a similar argument.

In an article entitled “Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?,” he argues that civil society organizations such as “sports clubs, religious groups and parent-teacher associations” allowed Nazi and antisemitic ideology to quickly spread throughout Germany without attracting official scrutiny. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/could-bowling-leagues-and-the-pta-breed-nazis-.html"

I can't think of anything that would breed anti-semitism faster and more effectively than Cass Sunstein.

"So let's say the Mossad knows all about Steve Sailer. Can Steve Sailer point to a single way this has affected his life?"

So let's say the Mossad knows all about Barack Obama, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and any other federal official or office holder? Can I think of any way that this might have influenced their votes, decisions, and - as a result - the government's policy? Hell Yes, I can.

What Snowden made plain is that a great deal of what our government does might be due to blackmail.

The NSA had laws requiring them not to spy on Americans, and yet did it anyway, The Mossad (or whatever you call Israels sigint agency) may have a secret agreement not to spy on Americans. I'm somehow skeptical that this has much effect.

Leaked documents show the existence of a program of handing over massive amounts of information from spying on our own citizens to a foreign intelligence service, alongside a set of promises we asked them to make about only use it in ways we approve of. It may be that you could find some child of eight years old somewhere who would believe that a foreign intelligence service would keep such promises, but you'd want to look for a really sheltered eight year old child.

This is a demonstration of a broad pattern, in which sigint agencies in particular and folks at the top of governments in general conspire with one another against the interests and well-being of the people they allegedly work for. If we reward this by continuing to support politicians too cowardly or beholden to the spies to push back on it, we will get more of it.

A couple of comments were posted about Israelis stealing US missile secrets and selling them to China.

I dont know anything about China but I know this:

I worked for a defense company in Israel for 5 years. Although no one here may believe it, the missile technology does not flow from the US to Israel. It flows from Israel to the US. Hard to imagine, I know, but look up RAFAEL - most Americans have never heard of it.

Second, the other commenter referring to mine as "comedy gold" should apply Occam's Razor to the question of Israel's interest in Syria. The Assad regime they know is preferable to an Islamist unknown.

That hasn't been the pattern. Historically, they have covertly supported Islamists (Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood) over secular nationalist types.

In the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.

[...]

In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And … Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

Does this include things like corporate insider information, the kind you can make money off of if you share it with your friends?

Nooo. Smart folks never profit from stuff like that. They always play strict rules of golf. Now, clearly it'd be a different story if there weren't so many smart Jews, but since there are, you're treading dangerously close to "ANTI-SEMITISM!!!"

Israel's preference is neither for Assad not for the Sunnis. It's for Arabs fighting each other. That way they have less time and resources to fight Israel. As long as Assad holds power, Israel and the neocons will support his enemies. If Assad falls, Israel will start supporting the people who'll have a grudge against the new government of Syria, whoever that will be.

I find this plausible. Israel treats the whole region as enemies, more or less. The more chaos they can stir up, the more they can forestall stability, development, and peace in the region outside their borders, the better.

But hey, why object to having, in effect, an Israeli spy sitting in every room in your house? How does it hurt you? Unless you are doing something wrong, you shouldn't worry, right? In any case, it's none of your concern. Pass the knish.

Yep. I bet Germans said something similar to the mischlings who qualified as German under the Nuremberg Laws: "hey, no big, you've still got your deli. As long as you keep your papers in order, how does it hurt you? You have nothing to fear, as long as you're doing nothing wrong."

Although no one here may believe it, the missile technology does not flow from the US to Israel. It flows from Israel to the US. Hard to imagine, I know, but look up RAFAEL - most Americans have never heard of it.

There has been some cross pollination of IDF/Israeli tech to the US. Weapons like Popeye (AGM-142) have been placed into service for niche applications where the bloated US MIC simply is too unwieldy to task. We've procured weapons from all over, for example anti-ship missiles from Norway (AGM-119 Penguin), tank guns built under license from Germany, and so forth.

Where US/IDF collaboration was most useful, was in obtaining then current Sov hardware from the various Arab client states. As well as using the IDF as proxies to evaluate various TTP's to counter said hardware. Obviously, that has become much less valuable with the fall of the USSR as well as our own 10+yr's of constant combat operations. Interestingly, 10yrs of slaughtering Arabs and other 3rd worlders has really reduced previously high opinions of the IDF's prowess.

Leaked documents show the existence of a program of handing over massive amounts of information from spying on our own citizens to a foreign intelligence service, alongside a set of promises we asked them to make about only use it in ways we approve of.

This is why not reading the document just makes you look stupid. The information being shared is not the communications of U.S. citizens. It says so right in the document. The document is about what to do to if selectors believed to be foreign turn out to be American.

If you want to come up with some theory about why the document is a lie and NSA really is sharing communications, and went to the trouble to create a secret document just to mislead you, good for you. But there's no evidence for it here.

Jonathan Pollard.

One guy, 25 years ago, who had nothing to do with Americans' communications. All right then.

If that bit about Israel being largely behind the rise of Hamas is true, it should permanently end the notion that the Israelis are some supercompetent manipulators in the region. It looks like the same kind of screwup that led us to helping arm and train the guys who would later become the Taliban and some of rhe core supporters of Al Qaida.

This is the lesson that should most inform our response to yet another proposed war, invasion, bombing, arming of one side of a conflict. etc. We just aren't very good at this stuff. Probably nobody is, but we have a particularly bad record of picking people to support who later turn on us, or going into some apparently very easy, low-risk military operation and finding ourselves tangled up in some decade long grinding war of attrition. Before we let dad gamble the vacation home on his latest sure thing horse racing system, maybe we ought to look at how well he's done so far with the last few he's tried.

EU countries regularly share data regarding their own citizens, who are members of Islamic radical organizations, with the US. So what? Is anyone here surprised or offended by that? The CIA kidnapped an Italian off the streets of Italy - do you not think the Italian secret services gave us any information about this "Italian"? The Brits regularly give us information about "British" citizens who are prone to set off bombs in our aircraft. Are you really shocked the British would give us information about their "citizens"? I am sure we do the same with Israel. And I am glad of it. Do you think a nation of 7 million is really interested in anything but the Arabs or muslims or that they would even have the power to process any other information? They are interested in Islamic terrorists who may be "American" citizens and I have no doubt we share this information --- as it is shared with us. GOOD! The left wing Greenwald is an idiot.

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